Man maketh a death which Nature never made.

This line is associated with Edward Young’s long religious-philosophical poem *The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality* (commonly *Night Thoughts*), written in the 1740s amid a culture preoccupied with mortality, consolation, and Christian hope. Young’s poem repeatedly contrasts “Nature” (the created order and its cycles) with human moral agency, arguing that what is most terrifying about death is not merely biological cessation but the spiritual and ethical “death” humans bring upon themselves through vice, despair, or estrangement from God. The phrasing reflects Young’s broader aim: to reframe death as a moral and theological problem rather than a purely natural event.

Young’s claim hinges on a distinction between natural death and a specifically human-made kind of death. Nature “makes” the ordinary end of life, but humans, through their choices, can manufacture a worse condition: a death of the soul, a deadening of conscience, or a self-inflicted ruin that exceeds anything inherent in the natural world. The line thus criticizes the tendency to treat death as merely physical while ignoring the moral dimension of living. It also implies that fear and misery around death are often products of human wrongdoing or misperception—an artificial horror layered onto a natural necessity.